Sound Bites Over Jerusalem

By Adam Nagourney

Published: April 25, 1999

It was a warm and sunny saturday morning, the heart of the Sabbath, and most of Jerusalem was shuttered -- except for a second-floor corner suite in the King David Hotel, looking out over the Jaffa Gate and the rough stone walls guarding the Old City. Inside, the fax machine beeped, a cell phone trilled and Israeli newspapers and campaign memos were scattered across the floor. An easel displaying scribbled poll numbers was perched in a corner, and dirty plates, half-filled coffee cups and wineglasses littered the tables, the remnants of 12 hours of breakfast and dinner meetings. There was no sign on the door, but the suite served as the headquarters for the re-election campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, if only for one reason: Arthur J. Finkelstein, the Republican political consultant from the United States, was in Jerusalem today, and this is where he was staying.

Finkelstein himself seemed tense and preoccupied as he opened the door to his suite. Netanyahu's main opponent in the May 17 election, the Labor Party candidate Ehud Barak, had recently announced on television that, if elected, he would withdraw all Israeli troops from Lebanon by the middle of 2000. ''His secret plan to end the war in Lebanon -- it's absolutely Nixon,'' Finkelstein says caustically as he pours a cup of coffee, recalling Richard Nixon's 1972 promise to end the war in Vietnam. Barak's pledge was sketchy, but coming at the end of an anxious week in which three Israeli soldiers died in Lebanon, it had captured the public's attention.

Even before he left the United States for Jerusalem, Finkelstein had ordered the Likud campaign into action: it conducted a poll of Israeli voters on Barak's pledge and his party's surprisingly vivid suggestion that Netanyahu was ''stuck in the Lebanon mud.'' The results were waiting for Finkelstein when he checked into the King David. By a margin of ''better than 2 to 1,'' Finkelstein says, voters saw the Barak declaration as politics as usual. This finding guided the response Netanyahu and Finkelstein scripted that weekend. The Prime Minister would not even pretend to address the issue directly, but would instead attack the character of his opponent for raising it, underscoring what Netanyahu wants to be the campaign's central question: Which of these two men is tough and steady enough to assure Israel's survival?

Over the course of the weekend they drafted the slogan, ''Ehud Barak: Too Many Ambitions, Too Few Principles.'' By Monday morning -- with Finkelstein back in the United States -- those words would be posted on the wall of Netanyahu's party headquarters, published in his newspaper advertisements and incorporated into the daily talking points that guide his cabinet ministers' conversations with Israeli reporters.

Finkelstein did not know it, but the attack he was responding to that weekend was largely the handiwork of another American political consultant, one he has never met and does not particularly admire, but who is also working in Israel this spring. James Carville had flown to Tel Aviv two weeks earlier to join Bob Shrum -- one of two other Washington consultants working for Barak -- to present the American recommendations on how the Labor Party challenger could boost his struggling campaign. Seize control of the daily debate, said the Americans -- Carville, Shrum and Stanley Greenberg, who was President Clinton's pollster in 1992 and is Barak's pollster now. Speak in short, declarative sentences and jettison the bulky arguments that had been the quaint mainstay of Israeli political dialogue. Every interview, every speech, must include a fundamental assault on those parts of Netanyahu's record where three months of polling had found voters' reservations to be most pronounced. ''Netanyahu,'' said Carville, ''is stuck.'' He was stuck on the economy, stuck on the peace process, stuck in how he ran his Government. And. . .stuck in the Lebanon mud.

American consultants have been flying in and out of Israel since Prime Minister Menachem Begin called in David Garth of New York in 1981, playing a low-key (and not particularly significant) role in how campaigns are conducted. But this year's contest -- which many politicians think will most likely be decided by no more than a percentage point or two and seems sure to result in a June 1 runoff -- is different. Sound bites, rapid response, repetition, wedge issues, ethnic exploitation, nightly polling, negative research, searing attack advertisements on television -- the familiar tools of American elections have now arrived in the Middle East. The 1999 contest for Prime Minister of Israel is providing a stage for a struggle between the seminal Democratic and Republican consultants of the past 15 years, the principal architects of what has become the signature American style of political discourse -- one that rewards simplicity over complexity, shock over substance and Election Day victory over governing and nearly everything else. (The third major candidate in the Israeli race, Yitzhak Mordechai of the new Center Party, has not retained his own American consultant for one reason, an aide said: he can't afford it.)